


Into the Flood

by Beguile



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: AU, Ach-To, Force Healing, Force calling, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Temptation to the Dark Side, broken leg, bunch of Force stuff, curmudgeonly old Jedi Master, fall - Freeform, idealistic apprentice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28343580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile
Summary: Rey falls and breaks her leg and isn't sure anyone is coming to find her.Someone does. It's not who she expects.
Relationships: Rey & Luke Skywalker
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have had this particular story idea in my head since seeing _Force Awakens_. When I never ended up seeing _The Last Jedi_ in theatres, I forgot all about it. But then, this past weekend, with the waning days of my Disney+ subscription, I caught up on the rest of the sequel trilogy and a whole bunch of emotions, feelings, and ideas came back to me. This story is one of those things, and me posting it is the equivalent of a frustrated parent ditching their errant child at summer camp because _my child is a fanfic who just wouldn't leave me alone and this is the internet, not a summer camp_. 
> 
> I wasn't even going to write this story, but then I logged into Tumblr and the first post was, "Write that indulgent fic! Treat yo-self!" so really this is all Tumblr's fault. And my idolization of Luke Skywalker. And all the feelings I have about _Star Wars_. 
> 
> This scene would take place after the first time Rey sees Ren and starts some of her training with Luke, but before her trip to the cave and the hand-touching scene in her hut. I'd go back and check but my Disney+ subscription has expired.

* * *

Rey’s scream upon waking is swallowed up in a crashing wave. Her leg is white hot, stiff, zig-zagged on the rocks. One break to the thigh, the other at the knee. Both of them burning and straining under her skin. 

Her chest aches with fresh bruising. Blood drains around her mouth. She wipes a hand across, finding loose teeth under her cut cheek. Her nose, while not broken, stings from the salty air. Water froths and crashes a few feet away from where she lies in a tiny alcove between the cliffs. Looking up, she sees the crumbled dirt on the cliff’s edge above from where she slipped and fell.

The shakes start. Rey forces herself to still, to calm. She’s been through worse scrapes than this in harsher terrain with fewer people around. She’ll manage.

“Hello!” she calls upwards. “Can anyone hear me? Hello!?”

The lack of response gnaws at her nerves. Rey turns where she sits, digging her fingers into the rockface behind her. She pulls herself up to standing, blood rushing into her mangled leg. Her stomach lurches; she nearly retches. A few deep breaths got the stars out of her eyes, but her right knee was buckling underneath her, unable to support her weight.

“Hello!” she shouts one more time before sinking back down onto the rock.

A few bulbous eyes and brown heads look down at her from the cliff’s edge. Under the porgs’ scrutiny, Rey finds her shaking returns with renewed vigor. Her blood runs hot while her skin runs cold, and the mist from the raging ocean speaks to greater chill if she spends too long there.

She slides herself down the rock to the water’s edge, her left leg protesting every inch. A scream builds inside her, one she swallows, though the waves cover every sound she does make. If she can get into the water, she could follow the shore and find a place to climb out. A wave crashes into the cliffside; saltwater stings her eyes and the cut in her mouth. Rey clings to the rock beneath her, telling herself she could make it, willing herself to believe it, but the thoughts unsustainable. One look at the horizon tells her she won’t. The waves would keep coming, one after another. She would eventually be overcome.

Rey scrambles back up to where she fell, leaning back against the rock. She closes her eyes and draws several breaths, holding them longer each time until her mind stills, until her shaking stops. The pain in her leg is tolerable in the space between all living things. The pulse of the island appears to her; she follows it away from her own raging heartbeat, from the splashing waves, from the rock walls stretching up and around her. What starts as a pulse turns into a symphony as she holds her focus. There is the rustle of grass, the scuffle of porgs; Chewie, at the Falcon, performing maintenance: Rey calls out to him through the Force, but he doesn’t notice. She withdraws when the effort becomes too great, searching for another target. Several caretakers walk the paths. If they hear her, they don’t change their course. 

Rey returns to herself, sinking lower, her head spinning from the exertion. Her saliva is thick in the back of her throat. She wipes at the fresh blood coming from her nose, salt crumbling from around her lips as she does. With one deep breath, she closes her eyes and dives back into island. Master Skywalker is always the hardest to find, but his routine is so familiar, Rey calls out on his usual routes. _Hear me_ , she begs. His refusal to use to the Force renders him unfindable and unknowable. At least with Chewie and the caretakers, she knows they aren’t coming. With Master Skywalker, there’s hope, always hope. Such bitter company for bitter circumstances.

She comes back to herself, weak and light-headed from the effort. A scream dies in her mouth for her leg. The shaking stops out of exhaustion. All she can do is breathe, just breathing. It’s more than enough, and it’s not good enough.

The only way out is up. She should start climbing. She manages to turn and get one hand into fingerholds before her strength gives out.

* * *

Water greets her – rain on her face, ocean lapping at her distended knee from the rising tide. The sky was so dark with clouds, Rey can’t tell how much time has passed, how long she’s been out. Her arm is numb from behind pinned under her torso. Rey frees it clumsily, rolling over with a raspy groan as fresh bruises ache and strain from the motion. Her broken leg settles on the rock so painfully the air is forced out of her lungs.

The waves are more violent now. Water comes all the way up to her knee. Rey watches the walls of waves move toward her, their deaths along the rocks framing her shelter a deafening roar. She plants her hands onto the stone, ignoring the cold and the wet. She reaches through the island only to gasp, snapping back inside herself, horrified. The chaos of the storm stirs up all those connections Master Skywalker talked about. Grass intermingles with porgs, with rock, with sea and sky. The people she wants to find are inside ships or hovels or, in Master Skywalker’s case, his own defences. He provides no Force signature, no touchstones. If this were a sandstorm, she could find her way, but this living, evergreen chaos is new and snarled, and Rey feels her consciousness waning at the thought of trying again.

The rain splashing against her face softens. Rey draws herself up to the wall, a deeper cold settling over her bones. Ren is there – she senses him, and then he emerges from the storm. His energy gathers in the alcove with trained focus, and he holds back the next barrage of waves with molecular precision.

His brow furrows. “I can’t see where you are,” he says. Lightning flashes overhead, and he must not see that either. “But I know you’re alone.”

Rey nods, not seeing a point in lying to him. Her thoughts race. What to do? Her grip on the Force is weak, no match for a man who can hold back a storm. Which, indeed, he does, drawing the Force around them so tight the cliffs go black. The light grows dim. The ocean and rain disappear. Only the tide remains, ebbing threateningly at her thigh.

She remembers earlier, how quickly Ren vanished when his former mentor appeared. “Master Skywalker is coming,” she says. It’s not a lie, because Master Skywalker _is_ coming. A whole day without seeing her had to make him suspicious.

Chewie has to be wondering where she is, at any rate. 

“No, he isn’t,” Ren says.

“Yes, he is. He went to go get a rope.” 

“He left you here. Alone.” The furrow in his brow intensifies, and Rey can’t tell if he’s performing incredulity or truly mystified.  
  
“No,” Rey says more sharply. That much is true: Master Skywalker can’t leave who he was never beside to begin with.

Ren’s energy in the alcove eases. Rey feels his focus creeping over the island, as hers had done. He doesn’t make it very far before turning his attention back to her. “Is that why I’m here? Are you calling out to me?”

Revulsion runs through her. “I did not call you here,” Rey snaps.

“You called for Luke. He didn’t come.”

“He’s coming.”  
  
“Is he training you?”

Rey doesn’t answer. She looks up. The inky blackness of Ren’s power makes the empty cliffside all the sharper in her vision. Even if he can’t sense her, Master Skywalker must sense Ren. He is coming, right now. As they speak. 

“Perhaps he sensed the darkness inside of you.”  
  
She levels her gaze, about to ask how Ren knows, but then she realizes that he didn’t. He tested her, and she failed the test, Master Skywalker’s horror from their first lesson too fresh in her head.

“He sensed the darkness in me too,” Ren offers. “He tried to destroy it, but he failed. Seems he’s found a more effective way for dealing with you.”

Rey gets her thoughts out of a spiral and back on her breathing. “I’m not alone. He’s coming. You should leave before he gets here.”  
  
“He should come back soon. The tide is rising. You won’t stand a chance against the current with only one leg. Can you even swim? I didn’t think they had lakes on Jakku.”

“I won’t have to swim.” She’s telling herself as much as she is telling him and hopes she finds him more convincing that she does. “He is coming, and when he does, I will be coming for you, Kylo Ren.”

“To finish what he started,” Ren says. Before Rey can ask more, “No wonder he’s left you here. The water is an inelegant solution, but it is a solution.

“Maybe that’s why the Force brought me here. I survived him. I can help you survive him too.”  
  
“I don’t need your help!”

“You’re alone. He left you here. You’re going to be washed out to sea, crushed against the rocks.”  
  
“I am going to be fine,” Rey says. Her chest is tight: from the cold, from the pain, from the initial fall. She tries to match her breathing to his, to keep her heart from beating out of her chest. She has been alone for almost her entire life. She’s been stranded in worse scrape on Jakku and survived. And Master Skywalker or Chewie or the caretakers – anyone other than Kylo Ren – are coming. They’re coming for her.

“I could fix your leg.”  
  
Rey tears her eyes from the cliff’s edge above, still empty, and looks back to him. He stares at her, his expression soft, even as the all-encompassing dark looms behind him.

“I sense you, even from here. I sense your injuries. I could set the bone. It would give you a fighting chance.”  
  
“I don’t want your help.”

“You’re going to need it.”  
  
She lets out a gasp, her vision graying at the edges. Ren hasn’t moved, but he feels closer. The air is heavier, thicker, and tastes of something other than sea spray and blood. Rey searches for that chaos from earlier, her own link to the Force, but she can’t find it through the dark. There is only Ren.

“He’s coming,” she says, clinging to the thought like a lifeline.

“He left you. You’re alone,” Ren tells her. Simple as that. 

She shakes her head to clear it, mounting a meager defence against him. The focus is more than she can take, but she’s determined to maintain it. “He’s coming.”

Ren reaches out a hand towards her. “Let me help you.”  
  
Her hand twitches at her side, sending a large splash of water over her lap. The tide reaches the rock wall behind her, nearly covering her legs. The sight of her broken limb breaks her concentration. Healing it would give her the strength she needs to swim to shore. But the thought doesn’t sound like her, and when she thinks harder, she hears the voice splintering into hundreds of smaller voices, Ren’s being the loudest and most forceful.

Rey presses her palms into the rock beneath her. She reaches straight through the darkness, searching for the island on the other side, for the chaos outside of Ren’s perfect order. A spark alights at her fingertips and shoots up her arm, distant and dim, and she avoids holding onto it. She lets it pass through her and finds herself welcomed as an old friend, broken and imperfect, while Ren’s hand draws closer and closer, his darkness seeping into her mind.

Dimly, she’s aware of Ren’s phantom fingers at her left thigh, the Force weaving into her muscle and around the broken bones.

A figure drops out of the darkness to her side. Water splashes across her chest and face, and with the sudden flash of elements, Ren is gone, and his horrific darkness gone with him. The sky opens up in a brilliant flash of lightning. The whole world is gray and misting. Rain comes down in a torrent. Rey finds herself breathing far too fast, the awful pain in her leg and chest and face returning with such intensity that all her thoughts fall silent.

Lightning flashes again. Rey looks up to see Master Skywalker’s face under his hood.

“You came,” she says, surprised.

“Yeah,” he replies. “I came.”

Rey can’t tell why he’s disappointed about that. She doesn’t care.  
  
“He said you wouldn’t.”

“Who?”  
  
She didn’t mean to say that aloud. Her eyes drop to his boots in the water in shame, then flit back up to his face as he kneels down. They don’t stop there. Rey’s vision goes up and up into blackness.

* * *

Happy reading! 


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

Luke catches Rey before she slides off the wall and into the water. He’s rising, drawing her up with him, when she senses the wave coming. He drops into a crouch, one arm clutching her to his chest, the other bracing against the wall. The water strikes him from behind, washing over his hood. He tucks Rey tighter to his chest, rooting down through his feet in preparation for the water’s retreat. The ocean nearly takes them if not for his fingertips crimped against a thin groove in the rockface.

His knees pop as he rises. Luke groans, part from the extra weight, mostly from the frustration. He gets by without reminders of his age, of the time he’s had and wasted. Now, he’s keenly aware of what an old man he’s become. Rey’s head hangs over his arm; her scalp grazes the wall, and he nearly drops her, trying to get her upright. The Force isn’t with him any longer, too wrapped up in the chaos of the storm, so he physically turns to check for another wave. The ocean stretches out being him in a torrid void. Rain comes down almost as heavily as the tide, splashing over his hood and down Rey’s face as she sags out of his arm.

She isn’t gone. The spark inside her, the one that threatened to send the whole island up in flames upon her arrival, is distant, but alive, present. She’s buried it, tried to hide it from the water and the cold, and Luke felt the irritation of her arrival anew. Only the Force would bring another child under his tutelage, a child fascinated by darkness. It was exactly what he deserved and somehow too much to bear, because she was so much more at risk than him.

He draws the rope to him with a quick tug and draws it around Rey’s upper chest, under her arms, into a tight knot. Uncomfortable, sure, enough that Rey starts to rouse. Luke gives her a gentle push with the Force to keep her out. The pain from the leg is bad; the quick glimpse inside her head makes Luke’s molars hurt, his stomach churn, his body tense. He pushes Rey not to feel it, and that spark inside her reacts, but one tug on the line gets Chewie lifting her, and she fades back into unconsciousness again.

The next wave comes the second she’s out of harm’s way. Luke slams into the cliffside headfirst, his fingers sliding against the slick rock. The Force doesn’t bother guiding him. He finds that groove again for his fingers out of sheer, dumb luck. Getting back to his feet is nearly impossible, but he manages, rising to meet Chewie’s lantern light as it sways over the cliff’s edge. The rope tumbles down, and Luke takes it, climbing as best he can before Chewie does the rest of the work to get him the hell out of there. Using the Force would only drain him more, and he needs strength for Rey’s leg, possibly more. 

There is no thrill from being back on solid ground. Rain had turned the grassy hills slick, threatening to drop them all back into the alcove. Chewie takes Rey in his arms, his feet and strength faring better against the elements. Luke gathers the rope and the lantern, following behind, slower. The light pierces through the rain to the jagged, crackling line of Rey’s broken leg, swaying at odd angles over Chewie’s arm. He reaches out to her, just enough to make sure she isn’t in pain. When she rises to meet him, Luke tries something softer, a plea, and she seems to accept that.

The alcove nags at his senses, and reflexively, Luke shifts his focus, drawn to the crackle and spark lingering in their wake. He looks back, shining the lantern, half-expecting to see someone there from how powerful the signature is. The light is no match for the dark, a darkness Luke feels acutely, with a familiarity that only a Skywalker could.

* * *

They go to the huts instead of the Falcon out of convenience. Rey’s quarters are frigid without a fire. Luke sees to building one while Chewie lies Rey on the cot. He gives a small roar about going to the Falcon for medical supplies, then disappears into the rain. 

The fire is small but effective. Luke sheds his soaked jacket, letting the fire draw some feeling back into his bare hands before he turns. Muscle memory almost takes over, guiding him through the process, but he’s useless suddenly. Stunned into silence and shame at the sight of Rey, bloody water on her face, her leg mangled on the cot.

Uncertainty grips him, a foreign feeling given how much of his life has become routine. Living here, in exile, seemed like acceptable recompense for his failure with Ben. The Force even seemed content. The last Jedi, here, at the beginning, waiting to die. And who should follow his trail of breadcrumbs but a hopeful, brimming with so much of the Force and just enough darkness Luke gets to relive one last failure before he goes.

He left her alone. She nearly died. The darkness in that alcove, if it was hers, terrifies him. Left unchecked, she could be worse than Ren, more terrifying, and wouldn’t that be the way of things?

The self-pity unnerves him. Old age seems to be a steady stream of grievances, most of which are self-inflicted. Luke shifts his focus back to Rey. The break – _breaks_ – are brutal. He clears his thoughts and lets his body take over, his legs guiding him to her side. He doesn’t let himself kneel; he might never stand up. Instead, he grabs the chair and brings it over, sitting down by the mangled limb. He draws a breath, holds out his hands, and he reaches through her skin into the muscle, probing the breaks in the bones tentatively.

Rey begins to rouse. Luke forgets the leg, instead blocking her nerves before the pain reaches her. His breath catches in his throat from the agony, and he hopes Rey doesn’t catch his gasp.

Her brow furrows. She catches something. Her eyes open, and she blinks in confusion, searching the room for answers. “What are you doing?” she asks. When he doesn’t answer – because he can’t – she continues, “It…I…feels strange. Are you in my head?”   
  
Luke tries to find the balance between pushing the pain down and greeting it as a friend. “I’m going to set your leg,” he says through gritted teeth.

Rey sets her jaw and gives a slight nod. “I can take it.”

“So can I,” Luke says. The pain is already settling, allowing him to focus on the leg. He hasn’t worked with the Force like this in a long time, and his hands fall into his lap, shaking. “You shouldn’t be awake for this,” as if her consciousness is the reason he’s stopped.

Rey doesn’t question him. She accepts this as her fault and sets her jaw harder. “It’s fine. Set it.”

“Rey.”   
  
“I can take it. Set it.” She glances at him to see that he tries to begin. When he doesn’t, she says, pointedly, “You said the Force wasn’t about getting into people’s heads.”

“It’s not,” Luke replies with a groan. He inches his body further on the chair towards her, finding those breaks without much difficulty now that her nerves have become his. He takes hold of the living Force in her leg, the fraying threads in her muscles and her tendons and her bones, and he gives them a small tug, testing where they lead. Rey gives a small cry, then grits her teeth with renewed fervour, refusing to make a sound.

Luke draws a breath, closes his eyes, and tugs sharply. The bones snap and fuse. The tears in the muscles scream and burn. The swelling worsens rather than improves. But it’s all he can do for the moment. He releases her, his head spinning, his mouth dry. All the pain pours back into her from the broken connection. Rey’s back arches and a silent scream tears out of her throat. She puts a hand over her mouth, blood seeping out through the fingers, under her palm, as she cries openly, quietly.

There are tears on Luke’s cheeks too. He brushes them aside, brushing all of it aside: all the pain and the emotion, from her and from him. He doesn’t care where it comes from so long as its gone and he can do what needs to be done. He turns too soon, his vision still blurry, head still spinning. He sinks back into the chair and reaches out, guided by instinct, towards the muscle.

Rey is shaking. She can’t catch her breath. The words are coming out of him, the things he needs her to do (the things he needs to do) – _relax, breathe, focus_ – and Rey is trying, but lying still takes all the strength she doesn’t have. Her energy is nothing but knots, and Luke can’t detangle them. He isn’t sure how much longer he can withstand the agony of the break again, but he takes it, catching it right at the nerve and sending it all into his body.

His vision goes white. His body disappears, overwhelmed by the Force. He breathes into it, allowing the pain to be, allowing himself to exist as he is, and when that threatens to undo him, he hears Rey exhaling. He senses her body relaxing. He feels her hand falling off of her mouth and the tears drying on her cheeks. The snarl of living energy inside her relaxes, and Luke dives headlong into it. He speaks to the marrow in her bones and the tissue in her muscle, to the lymph and blood flooding her arteries; to the busted blood vessels and the shorn tissue. He channels the Force into her, compelling them to do what they will – regenerate, subside, _heal_.

The pain in his own body gradually subsides. Tears trickle down his cheeks into his beard. The tension in his own chest loosens, and Luke breathes, the healing happening faster now, his own command of the Force never truly having left despite his best efforts to put it behind him.

He glances at Rey to find her eyes closed. She’s breathing steadily. Gingerly, Luke gives her a push, seeing if she’ll sleep, but she resists. Fine, then. He gives her nerves back to her, one at a time, the pain subsided but not gone, and he asks, “Who said I wouldn’t come?”   
  
Rey’s eyes open, but she doesn’t look at him. “Ren.”   
  
“You saw Ren.”   
  
She nods. “He saw me. Not where I was, just me. He said you were leaving me there to let the water finish me off. An inelegant solution, but a solution just the same.”   
  
“Very inelegant, especially given…” Luke gestures to her leg, straight but swollen, unable to finish his thought. He detaches from her and sags back into his seat, his head entering zero gravity. The chair is the only stable thing in his perception. His eyes close, and he thinks he might fall asleep right there, an old man spent from, what? A few minutes playing Jedi Master? The great Luke Skywalker, indeed. He speaks to keep himself from nodding off: “He was wrong.”

“Why did you come?” Rey asks.

Luke can’t even muster the energy to shrug. “You’ve been following me around since you got here.”   
  
“So you missed me.”   
  
“You didn’t seem the type to give up,” Luke says.

“I’m not,” Rey replies.

He ignores that. Let her come to the truth on her terms. She won’t believe him otherwise. Instead, he asks, “What did Ren want?”   
  
“I don’t know. Probably just to taunt me.”   
  
Luke opens his left eye in scrutiny. He hears the tone in her voice, recognizes it. “You don’t believe that.”   
  
“Why else would he be there?”   
  
“How could he be there?” Luke wonders. The Force works in mysterious ways, but the only Jedi who have appeared to him across galaxies are dead.

“I don’t know.” And she’s telling the truth. “Do you not know, Master Skywalker?”

He shakes his head.

“Nothing in the ancient Jedi texts about how he could do it?”   
  
Luke is about to shake his head again when he realizes he’s being made fun of. Rey has a soft half-smile on her face.

He glares at her, but there isn’t an ounce of strength behind it. Mostly by choice.

* * *

Happy reading!


End file.
